needs more demons?

Note: I didn’t read the book jacket blurb, or anything else about Her Fearful Symmetry, before reading it. As a result I enjoyed some surprises in this novel that other reviewers or copywriters have revealed. I don’t think Her Fearful Symmetry is so dependent on all its twists that it can’t withstand some spoilers, but [...]

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The book jacket flap of Rubens’ comic science fiction novel explicitly invites comparison to Douglas Adams (also Terry Pratchett). I can’t decide if that’s terrible idea, or a pretty good one. One the one hand there are some superficial similarities to the milieu of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy so perhaps naming the [...]

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If you take its core plot at face-value, John Dies at the End is at least superficially a xenophobic horror story in the Cthulhu mythos mode. Wong gives his Big Nasties different names from Cthulhu and his crowd, but he specifically borrows a key concept from Lovecraft’s “From Beyond” — if you do something special [...]

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Warning: This review is more than a little mean.
I’ve mentioned Henry Jenkin’s introduction to Interfictions 2 once already. In it he makes an excellent point about genre: when we read genre fiction, we want it to conform somewhat to our expectations of the genre — but we also want it to somewhat confound our expectations [...]

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The phrase that kept coming to my mind to describe Boneshaker while I was reading it was “purely awesome.” The back cover copy gives away a little too much of the setup for my taste, but I will say that it shifts between being a steampunk adventure story and a gritty, claustrophobic zombie novel so [...]

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I loved this book almost unreservedly — it’s easily one of the 5 or 6 best novels I’ve read so far this year. The title is very literally descriptive: it’s the chronicle of Henry and Clare’s relationship. Henry jumps around in time (involuntarily, sometimes forward, mostly backward, mostly within his own lifespan); Clare moves linearly [...]

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